Inside the Spin-Mosaic Studio

The story unfolded backwards. Unfolding backwards doesn't work for things like sleeping bags, spicy burritos or laundry. But this time, the treasure would not have been found any other way. If the story had unfolded from the front end, my legs would have walked on by...

"...like everyone else." She said, when we finally had a conversation.

She, the persed-lipped woman in the blue button-down collared shirt with countless tiny cornrow braids across her high forehead that held back a waterfall of ringlet curls. Her expression was stoic compared to the playful child-like arrangement of her hair. I questioned if this blue Security uniform hid a different side of her. She watched me closely from within the likely-mandated confines of a toy soldier posture between the gaping door and astute stanchions.

My appearance mixed in with the crowd. Within seconds, they hovered and circled. Then, one head after another, turned away and walked on by.

My blue jeans and T-shirt no longer had anyone else blocking her view of...me. I quickly turned into "one to watch" by way of lingering default. There was no one else to watch.

The pattern of other ongoing crowd-walkers was consistent:

Walk, circle, swarm, stop.

    Look at the screen. 2 seconds--3 tops.

Squint eyes, tilt head, brows twist in confusion,.

    Hint of a head-shake, and...walk away.

In pursuit of the next muse.

That was their forgettable anti-phenomenon.

My phenomenon was different and something I have yet to figure out how to explain including to the face that most frequently frequents my mirror. Sometimes I enter a room or look into the face of a person and know, "There is something more here."

It's as if an invisible sign is posted saying,

Look closer.

      Dig deeper.

  See. Ask. Listen.

      There is a treasure to be found.

A screen was set up against the wall in this exhibit room that did not look unlike anything I had witnessed in most every classroom throughout my student days (which dates me by the decade). A film reel projector with all necessary apparatus sat proudly in the center with a similar ambiance as the taxidermy bull bust protruding from the brick wall at the Mexican restaurant last week.

Extension chords, on/off switches, tables to prop, etc.; it was all here.

The scene struck an urge in me from some archive in my past to sit down and study science charts. I shook the memory away with the same mixed emotions that my dog shakes off lake water. She loves the water when immersed in it, but hates the water when her four legs are planted on land.

Film reels are a thing of past decades; don't I know it. The film rolled across the high beam of a bright light bulb at a consistent speed creating a flashing picture on a screen several wingspans away. 

Nothing about this set-up looked like art. Yet, art is what I came to see in this big place in a big city, so it must be...Art? Art is what everyone came to see here: 1,000's of living and unconfined people a day. For this reason, I suspect, the crowd I found myself within walked on by this exhibit without a closer look.

Screen + film + light + electrical chords = movie clips? We can see those at home or as close as the device in our pocket. What were people expecting? What compartmentalized box did this exhibit fall into? What compartmentalized box did this exhibit escape?

The film spun and spun and spun, yet only one annoyingly flashing and indecipherable image keep flapping its wings onto the bright screen. It looked something like an abstract contour line drawing of a frantically drowning horse fly. The flicker morphed like Japanese calligraphy, then...the resemblance of a middle-of-the-night graphiti artist's 1st-sketch while paint-bombing the side of a parked train car (?).

I couldn't make it out. The image changed and flashed, yet was eerily the same with each flash and flicker. I couldn't look at it long; yet I didn't want to look away.

I am that high-maintenance customer who asks the waitress to stand on a chair at a restaurant and tug on the little ball-and-chain dangling from the ceiling fan. Motion triggers headaches and dizziness for me and evidently only me. I should be the 1st one to walk away from...whatever this is...art? The lights were too bright. The image was too random. Walk away. Walk away?

But, here I stood, frozen. There was more here. I knew it.

The projector had been disassembled and reassembled. This, I knew. In the same way a farmer might dig trenches from a main water source to direct the continuance of irrigation, extra apparatus had been crafted and added several feet away enabling the plastic spinning film to take a jaunt around the outside of the projector and then return to it.

So...the plastic strip of film took a Sunday afternoon walk around the projector and then came back.

What good did this serve? The image on the screen was not altered because of the extra jaunt. It caused the exhibit to take up more space; but the massive square footage of this museum had ample....open, gaping, daunting, empty space.

So, why the jaunt? Why the pause?

Honest, it did not come to me at once. I lingered like a stalled car in the drive-through line at our local frozen custard shoppe on a dog-day of August with drivers squirming in their seats behind me and arms hanging out windows.

As I stood figuring it out, people came along behind me, looked and left. I was still there with the abstract drowning fly flashing on the screen. Stuck.

Here's the hinge-pin. I know the mind of an artist because I am one. Artists prefer to not be predictable. Artist's who land their work in an esteemed place like this are intentional about...their intentions. Artists with intentional intentions possess intentional inceptions.

Sorry, but, why all the horse-hockey to create new apparatus for this strip of plastic film that appears to only rival the value of the scotch tape I peeled off my forefinger when poorly wrapping the box of legos for my son's friend's birthday party last week?

My own patience with the mystery began to run dry. I leaned as far over the draped stanchion as I could to get a better view of the spinning scotch tape.

Words! There were words written on this tape. Words were passing by the light bulb at a speed that had been painstakingly adjusted by the artist. Words rolled by the light bulb and flashed onto the screen too fast to read, but too slow to dismiss.

I looked away. She, the stoic woman in blue, was looking at me.

I had come to the end of my diagnostic skills and felt impatient. I turned to her. "What is this? What is this about...if you don't mind me asking?"

Though she couldn't have been more than thirty years old, her energies were aroused at the speed of an old sage. First her head turned, then she unclasped her hands from behind her back. With a deep breath, her voice seemed to come from a faraway place.

She didn't answer my question. Not right away. If anything, she seemed compassionately angry.

"Iv'e been stationed to this exhibit for 2 weeks. Nobody gets it. People stop and look, like you do, then they walk on by. You're the only one who looked longer. Your'e the only one who has ever asked me what this is all about. And, I am the one who knows. I know what it's about!"

Beneath her forehead of carefully pinned-back curls, her eyebrows turned stormy and her eyes became wet.

Truth. These were not just any words written across this carefully paced plastic film. These words, penned by the hand of the artist, were exact quotes of the weakest, but boldest words possibly ever spoken by humans. The same weighted stimuli to speak bore with each phrase quite possibly the broadest range of either grace or fury, faith or despair.

What was the difference? The difference was faith and forgiveness.

Clearly, she had waited long to share what she knew. I listened. What she had to say was worthy of my question, worthy to be heard, and worthy to be called Art with a capital A.

When she was finished talking, it was clear that any words I might have to offer to the open spaces of this room, felt unworthy. I simply said, "Thank you." and did not break my gaze. The moment was sacred.

Her badge drooped at an angle over her heart. Destiny. Her name was Destiny.

Destiny spoke. I listened.

As I walked away, I may have wondered if she were a guardian angel incognito as a security guard at a Big City art museum...sent to answer the questions of my over-curious mind and deliver the message the artwork invoked. Because, I wanted to know. Because, I asked.

When I walked away, she may have wondered if I were an angel, sent to ask the one question she wanted and needed to answer.

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"Call to me and I will answer you, and will tell you great and hidden things that you have not known." -- Jeremiah 33:3